"Abortion Tourism" Sheds Light on the Need for Health Care Access

Recent coverage of the abortion providers' strike in Spain and the attacks on women's clinics there made use of the term "abortion tourism." LifeSiteNews, an anti-choice web site, refers to Barcelona, Spain as "Europe's abortion mecca, where people from all over the continent can travel to evade restrictions on late-term abortions." There was also sensationalist media coverage in Spain with disparaging references to "abortion tourists from other countries."

In November of 2007, LifeSiteNews also reported that "foreign women will be allowed to have abortions in Sweden up to 18 weeks gestation starting in January 2008 under changes to legislation passed by the Swedish parliament ... Until now, abortion in Sweden has been reserved for Swedish citizens and residents, but since most European Union countries already allow foreign women access to abortion, the Swedish government has decided to follow suit ... Several Christian Democrat members of parliament have warned that the new law could lead to 'abortion tourism'."

There has always been abortion tourism. The term refers to travel undertaken in order to access to safe abortion care -- which is a long-standing crisis in the US as well as internationally.

In her May 2003 report "Envisioning Life Without Roe: Lessons Without Borders," the Guttmacher Institute's Susan Cohen provided some relevant history:

New York legalized abortion, without a residency requirement, in 1970, which immediately put New York City on the map as an option for those women who could afford to travel. Before that it was an open secret that affluent American women would travel to London to obtain safe, legal procedure.

As a young woman growing up in New York City in those years, I vividly remember many pregnant friends who also went to Mexico, Sweden, Japan, and Puerto Rico for their safe abortions. Of course, it was, as Cohen notes, "poor women, mostly young and minority, who [could not travel and] suffered the health consequences [of unsafe, illegal abortions], and maternal mortality rates were high. Women of means had more options."

Tragically, not much has changed. The race, ethnic, and class disparities of abortion access in the US are well-known and this theme is universal.

In October 2007, the Global Safe Abortion Conference in London discussed this issue in the context of "abortion journeys" -- the long, distressing, often expensive journeys that women are forced to undertake in order to access safe abortion due to restrictive legislation in their home countries. Writing about the discussion at the conference, Grace Davies noted, "These journeys -- abortion tourism -- are a tragic reality for women around the world, from Kenya to Poland. In fact, the term ‘abortion tourism' highlights one of the central characteristic of the phenomenon. In highly restrictive situations, class and socio-economic status play a huge role in whether or not a woman can access safe abortion."

The examples presented at the Global Safe Abortion Conference were instructive -- and heart-breaking. At the conference, Claudia Diaz Olavarrieta reported on the research she had conducted in Mexico before the landmark decision of last April legalizing abortion in Mexico City. She reported that "Mexican women traveling to the US for safe abortion care were typically well-educated and wealthy, did not cross the border illegally, and as such did not have to resort to unsafe clandestine or self-induced attempted abortions...they also typically came from wealthier [more cosmopolitan] Mexico City rather than poorer northern and eastern states."

"The girls with money go off to Europe or to the US and come back just fine from their ‘appendix operations,' but the poor girls are subjected to all kinds of barbarities," stated a passionate supporter of legal abortion in Mexico City at the time that the momentous new law was being passed. Meanwhile, an opponent of the new life-saving law angrily stated that "people from all over the country will be coming [to Mexico City] for abortions. It's going to be abortion tourism. It will be chaos."